M.F.A. in Creative Writing

People to Know

The Center's Director

Thorpe Moeckel, associate professor of English, directs the center. The author of a forthcoming trilogy of long poems, Arcadia Road, as well as a book of nonfiction, Moeckel came to Hollins in 2005.

The Center’s Benefactors

In 2008, Susan Gager Jackson ’68 and her husband, John Jackson, gave Hollins $5 million to found the center. Susan Jackson is the author of Through a Gate of Trees: Poems (2007) and the chapbook, All The Light In Between (2013).

Award-Winning Writers

Lee Smith ’67; Pulitzer Prize winners Annie Dillard ’67, M.A. ’68;Henry Taylor M.A. ’66; and Natasha Trethewey M.A. ’91 (shown in photo). Trethewey served as U.S. Poet Laureate from 2012 to 2014. Kiran Desai M.A. ’94 won both the Man Booker Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The fiction of Madison Smartt Bell M.A. ’81 has been recognized by a Strauss Living Award.

Creative Writing Program Founder

Louis D. Rubin, Jr.

Louis Rubin (1923 – 2013) arrived at Hollins in 1957 from Johns Hopkins University, where he had earned a Ph.D. in the aesthetics of literature. Rubin was primed to change the creative atmosphere at Hollins.